


Learning Curve

by papyrocrat



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-14
Updated: 2010-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-17 14:50:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papyrocrat/pseuds/papyrocrat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>  </p>
            </blockquote>





	Learning Curve

**Author's Note:**

> "My life is one long curve, full of turning points." (Pierre Elliot Trudeau).  Thanks for the beta, . Content note: contains Active-sex, mentions of events of _Belonging_. Slight AU.

Priya steps out of the elevator and looks around the Dollhouse, rubbing her palms against her thighs.Topher, too, is scrubbing himself clean, running both hands through his hair.The other man, Boyd, has kept a professional distance since he helped her out of the van, but now he gives her a kind but serious glance.“Priya, are you sure this is what you want?”

She nods decisively.Four years of massages and yoga is better than fifty years of seeing the rage in Nolan’s hateful eyes shudder into darkness.“Thank you both again, for not selling me to that horrible man.”

“Permanently, anyway,” Topher mumbles under his breath, and cranes his head upward to look as far away from her as possible.Priya follows his eyes to a dark-haired woman scowling down from the second floor.

“Who’s she?”Priya has always taken every escape offered, and now only curiosity keeps her mind out of the chair.For the moment, anyway.

“That’s the House doctor, Claire Saunders,” Boyd answers as Topher anchors his hands behind his neck and forces his gaze to the ground.

They walk towards the stairs, and Dr. Saunders turns on her heel and heads for her office.“Is she nice?”

Topher snorts.“You’re about to think so,” he says without looking up.

Boyd addresses Priya warmly.“Dr. Saunders is very nice.”The doctor’s door slams shut, and Boyd manages a small, disarming smile.“Usually.”

Priya follows the men upstairs.She thinks of the meditation classes she took when she was sixteen and desperate for a world larger than suburban Melbourne.She inhales and imagines her world shrinking to an underground utopia.She takes one long look at the dark boy in the third pod, and then she doesn’t think anything as she turns to lay back in the chair. 

*

Claire opens the lab door silently.

“It’s not that I’ve ever doubted my capability to be an international man of mystery, let alone a domestic dude of some limited yet crucial deception, but what happens to him-me if el capos de Rossum catch wind of this?”His self-indulgent cant pushes its way into her ears, as real as the rain she’s never felt on her face. Maybe her imprint is fading, because the air doesn’t thrum with the terrible feel of him.

“Rossum has at least as much of a stake in keeping Echo safe as Adelle does,” Boyd reassures him. “I doubt they’ll ask too many questions about the trip.”Another anomaly: he isn’t nattering away to himself.Claire starts to retreat from Boyd and his carefully persistent attentions, but he catches her reflection in one of Topher’s toys.“HelloClaire,” he says.

She’s never been rude – at least, not in two years, three months, and sixteen days – so she smiles tersely. “Boyd.How is Echo?”

“You know how Echo is.Her Haughtiness sent out a memo.Aren’t you the one with the touching yet baseless belief that people actually read the memos?”

Of course she’d read the memo; Rossum had intranet before the Department of Defense. Her visit is on the flimsiest of excuses, like every other time she’s come in here with a question.She considers glaring, when her jaw goes slack.“Victor?”

Topher’s smirk fits easily onto Victor’s handsome face.“I’m trying out a new look.You like?”

“Not particularly,” she snaps, and looks to Boyd, who seems pleased at her blank gaze.

“I wonder how high soldier-boy can jump,” the brain in Victormuses out loud, seizing her attention as firmly as if he’d grabbed her face with both hands, and bounds towards his trampoline.

_ This  _ then, is how they’d all felt those first few weeks after Alpha.She’d assumed the careful avoidance and repulsed stares were because of her broken face.Self-indulgent, maybe, but she’d had no idea that face wasn’t her own.

She turns back to Boyd.“I’d like to be appraised of Echo’s condition as soon as possible.I’ve been quite worried about her.”

Boyd smiles.“I’m sure she’ll appreciate your care.”

The trampoline creaks over her parting shot.“We try to be our best.”

*

He hears the _snick_ of the lock and jumps, his chips tumbling to the floor.

“Why her and not me?” Saunders demands without preamble.

“Why….who, Bennett?”

“Oh, you’d love it if this were about Bennett, wouldn’t you?” she snaps.He really would, he thinks desperately.He bets Bennett doesn’t creep up on people like this.And _glasses!_ “Why Priya, and not me?”

“What, I should have just let Nolan keep her?Priya deserved her life back after how that creep violated her…. _oh_.”

“So I was violated by the wrong creep, is that it?I seem to remember you were violated by that same creep, _Victor,_ ” she spits, and he – _Topher!_ he thinks, and pulls at his ear with Victor’s stubby fingers - flinches.“Maybe we’ll just keep you here forever too?”He blinks.“Of course, either way you live, at least once.”She steps towards him.“Must be nice.”

He backs away, falls into his couch and sprawls.“Yeah, I’m feelin’ the luck of the non-specifically northern European right now. What do you _want_ from me?”She glares.“And why now?Because we’re pretty much all hands on pod with this whole Rossum thing, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Because now is the only time I can stand to be around you, and what I _want_ is to know _why_.”

“And you’re coming to me for answers?You _hate_ me!”He eyes her hands and pockets warily for syringes.

“Well.There were a few years there, when I thought you were _nice_ ,” she hisses, eyes momentarily falling open in a scathing parody of Whiskey’s sweetness.“But now I hate you.Fortunately for me, I have all these quirks that made me want to stay away – pitch aversion to your voice, as if _that’s_ not annoying enough on its own, hypersensitivity to your pheromones, even your skin is too cold for me to touch.”As she speaks, she drops gracefully onto the couch next to him and slides her hand up his arm, leaning her beautiful mouth in towards his ear.“Funny thing about being a Doll.Everything you built can become a lie in an instant.”

He jumps back, but it’s too late, she’s sliding his key card into her pocket.He’s trapped with the Phantom.This is the longest he’s been in a room with her since…Alpha.“That’s another interesting _why_ , Topher.Why, when I was already going to disagree with you, detest you even, does it have to be so physically unpleasant for me to be around you?”

“So we don’t…” he waves his hands to commemorate the Awful Events of a few months ago.

She snorts.“Oh, because it’s wrong for Actives?You can whore us out to the rest of the world, but you’re just above what you make us do?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that.She seems to know there isn’t one.“I don’t know why you’re so convinced of your manly charms, Topher.You didn’t have to make me sick to look at you.”He flinches and looks away.“You could have made me gay.You did it to Sierra just yesterday.”His mind flashes from _gay_ to Claire to Sierra and back again and now is _definitely_ not the time, oh my God is it _ever_ not the time.“I know, I know. _Sierra is beautiful_.”Topher blinks, pushes something _down_. 

“Did you change your mind?” he interrupts.She looks momentarily thrown.“DeWitt is gone.I can restore your original personality, adios Saunders.Boyd will let it slide I bet, he’s got a thing for you.”

“That’s what it’s about, isn’t it?”

“Boyd?No, he’s really not my type.”

“You weren’t protecting me from you.You were protecting you from me.You want me gone.”She bends over, her hands against the back of his couch, and leans until he has to look at her face.“You look at me, and you see Alpha.” He swallows, chokes on her contempt.“You don’t care if you fail.You just don’t want to see it.”

“That is not true!”Unfortunately, she’s not startled or intimidated by his sudden yell – he knows because he made sure of it.But he has to defend himself, and his justification – _reasoning_ – clamors out.“I mean.Of course I care.It just –“ he swallows and tilts his head back against the wall; closes his eyes against her cold glare and still curls.“I was only trying to help.I was trying to help Priya when we brought her in the first time, and I helped her tonight.She won’t have to live with what she - what _I_ did to her.And I wanted to help you, I did!”She scoffs.“You think you know what it was like, after Alpha, but I didn’t give you that.You don’t want it.You were crying, and bleeding, and Doc Saunders – the other Saunders – he liked you, and Adelle said it was the only way to keep you out of the Attic.I couldn’t let that happen.”He meets her eyes.“I did this to you.Do you think I don’t know that?And I couldn’t do it again.I helped Priya because of you.”

It’s true, even if he didn’t know it himself until Scarley’s ghost locked him in and rattled her chains.

She reaches out and her fingers whisper across his face, as if she’s tracing a mirror.“So you learned,” she muses.He nods. He wishes he hadn’t, but he did.She leans in and for a moment looks like Adelle, all fair against impossible darkness.In the space of his confused blink, she’s taken her lean to its logical conclusion and slipped lightly across his lap.He’s sure it’s another fake-out until she slides her hand from his face to his hair and pulls, forcing him to look up at her.“I want to _understand_.”

_ So do I, _ he realizes, and sits up sharply to meet her mouth.He wonders for a fleeting second where she’s learned to kiss, and moves his hands to grip her hips as he remembers the chair.

They move quickly, as if they’re fucking at the very edge of the world.He pulls off his shirt as her hands slip down between their legs.He forces himself to stop.“Is this what you want?”

“I’m making what I want perfectly clear, Dr. Brink,” she snaps as she grasps for his zipper.“Don’t we want to be our best?”

He does, and so he pulls her soft panties to one side and pushes until he forgets.She’s silent and forceful and she never closes her eyes until her hips shudder to a stop.

He slumps back into the couch as she stands.Her dress falls back into place as if nothing has happened.She turns her back as he reaches for his shirt, and by the time he pulls his head through, she’s gone.

*

Boyd strides into her office, calmly disregarding her lack of welcome."This Bennett Halverson, she sounds like something special," he muses.  "A good influence on Topher."

Claire only grits her teeth slightly.  She looks across the floor into Topher's office as he and Adelle wrangle Victor into the chair.  "She does seem to have deflated his ego a little, which is remarkable on its own."

Boyd pauses, and smiles a little.  "Remarkable, indeed."  The chair lights up and jolts Victor into its warm oblivion.  Claire shudders slightly in recognition, as if her nerves remember what her mind cannot.  

"He seems to have quite the crush, really.I'd hate to think of what it would have come to if they'd had more than a day.  I don't know if they'd make a precious couple, or end the world." 

Boyd shrugs.“No reason it can’t be both.You never know around here.” 

“Never a dull moment,” Claire answers.

He seems to have realized she’s flirting back just before she does.“It does seem unfair, though, Adelle and Topher making it all the way out east when you haven’t left the lab.”Of course he thinks nothing’s happened.“About that dinner, Claire.”

She can’t quite say no to someone when she looks directly at him, so she stares out the window.Victor pads down the stairs and reaches out his hand to Sierra.Boyd takes her blush as encouragement and presses his advantage.“Any chance you’ve reconsidered?”

She looks back at Boyd, then towards Topher’s office, where he’s gripping a Capri Sun in one hand and typing with the other.Her lip curls with familiar disgust, but it feels softer on her face, like she’s put a warm compress on a stubborn knot.

“You never know, Claire.I think you’ll find the outside world a lot more familiar than you think.”

Her gaze flickers between Victor and Topher one more time, before she looks Boyd in the eye and smiles.


End file.
